Hello, Python

Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world — and for good reason. It reads almost like English, it's forgiving when you make mistakes, and it powers everything from web apps to machine learning.

Let's start with the most fundamental thing any program can do: print something to the screen.

print("Hello, world!")

print() is a function — it takes whatever you put inside the parentheses and displays it. The text inside the quotes is called a string. You can use either single quotes '...' or double quotes "..." — Python doesn't care.

print('Same thing, different quotes')

# This is a comment — Python skips this
print("But this runs!")

You can print multiple things by separating them with commas. Python adds a space between them automatically:

print("Hello", "from", "Python")